PERSPEKTIFNUSANTARA.COM– Nowadays, social media has become an important part of daily activities and influenced how the citizens share information. In line with this development, much viral content appears on social media, including sorrow or tragedy content. Unfortunately, the reality shows that when the tragedy has happened, many people do not directly give help to people. Otherwise, they open their phones and then record the tragedy. The bad moments or accidents directly become viral content on social media. This phenomenon appears to raise many controversial questions about how the culture can influence the empathy of the community in this digital era. Therefore, the culture of virality on social media has turned human suffering into digital content, reduce people’s sensitivity to tragedy, and gradually weakened moral awareness in online interactions.
Turning Human Suffering into Online Content
The priority about virality in online cultures changes people’s sadness into something used to make money in digital. sad events are often recorded and spread not for educational public purposes but rather to attract attention, participation, and maybe money or profit. A new trend in dealing with cases such as this can be related to the attention economy pushed by platforms; that tragic incident precisely gets a ‘’gift’’ by the system because of the strong emotional reaction. Here he real case that is related to this argument case of Ilyas Abdurrahman is a real case; when people in the case place references to records that happen, then give help for the victim. The virality of that video shows a trend change: tragedy becomes online consumption. The same thing happened for content creator Logan Paul; a video from the Aokigahara forest in Japan got critics because of human sadness as their entertainment. These trends show how they ignore ethics just of attract viewers on digital platforms.
Tragedy That Becomes Normal
Then, there is also a possibility that audiences become desensitized to tragedies that occur over time. This is also supported by research that has shown that emotional contagion occurs as a result of constant exposure to tragic situations. For example, if people are constantly exposed to content that shows accidents, deaths, and violence happening around them through social media, their response to a tragedy occurring will be reduced over time. This is also referred to as desensitization, which makes a person begin to see tragic situations as normal situations within digital media. For example, a person is exposed to videos of people getting into motorcycle accidents on social media. The person’s response to this is shock at what is happening to the people in the accident. However, over time, the person has been exposed to the same video of a motorcycle accident happening over and over again through their social media feeds. They become desensitized to it to the point that when they see a similar accident happening again, their response to it is reduced or is ignored as they scroll through their social media feeds.
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Moral Awareness Gets Lost Online
The combination of exploitation grief content for virality and monetization, coupled with people’s insensitivity to tragedy, has weakened moral awareness in digital interactions. Many people now focus more on the number of likes, shares, or followers than on the impact or ethics of the content they share. Emotional content, such as grief or accidents, spreads quickly, encouraging others to share it. As a result, inappropriate behavior such as filming victims without permission or sharing tragic content without empathy is beginning to seem normal. If this practice continues, our sense of morality and ethics in the digital world could further fade. For instance, in an accident on the Casablanca non-toll flyover in South Jakarta, a motorcyclist died. There was a video of this accident that went viral on social media. The video was shared without any censorship. In this video, there are a number of people who are more interested in taking videos with their phones than helping out the victims. This is certainly a situation that calls into question the actual moral fiber of these people.
In conclusion, culture viral in media social create new etics serious problems. Desire to get attention and benefit always reduces empathy and makes suffering from other people content. Therefore, all people in this digital era have to be responsible. Content creators need to think wisely before recording and sharing the sensitive situation, platforms need to review the system that pushes the exploitation content, and the community needs to consume the media with more empathy. If we are reliable and responsible, tragedy will always exploit the online world. Giving back empathy value in the digital world is not just important but also necessary to progress the technology without sacrificing humanity’s value.
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